NVIDIA Sees MacBook Air as The Mold for Next Gen Notebooks

If you were to ask the average consumer what they want out of their next laptop you can expect to hear affordable, but beyond that thin, light and speedy are the common requests heard from many end users. If you focus on the latter three criteria the first notebook that pops into most people’s minds is the MacBook Air which set a new standard for thin, light and snappy when it launched last year.

At the MacBook Air unveiling, Apple CEO Steve Jobs called the MacBook Air the future of Macbooks. Well, it looks like Apple isn’t alone in setting their sights on the MacBook Air. CNet reports that Hen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, told the publication in a phone interview that the next generation of notebooks will use the MacBook Air as inspiration.

It’s not just the external design Huang was speaking too either, he went on to say that these thin notebooks won’t need heat pipes or cooling systems like we are currently seeing on many thin and light notebooks such as HP CoolSense or like that found on Toshiba’s Portege R830.

Along the same lines, we can expect more laptops to incorporate the battery into the design, without leaving the option for users to replace the battery. We are already seeing this on the Samsung Series 9 and the Lenovo u260, but we’ll either need a breakthrough in battery technology or more efficient processors before notebooks as a whole can live up to the hype of an all day enclosed battery.